The background description includes information that may be useful in understanding the present invention. It is not an admission that any of the information provided in this application is prior art or relevant to the presently claimed invention, or that any publication specifically or implicitly referenced is prior art.
Efforts to create new modes of media consumption have evolved throughout the years. Traditionally, people watched TV, which broadcast content according to set schedules. Frequently, those schedules differ by time zone so that certain shows and programming could be viewed at reasonable hours on both coasts of the United States, for example. In the past, traditional broadcast models have implemented tape delays to ensure that content broadcast in, for example, the eastern time zone at 6 pm can also be viewed at 6 pm in the Pacific time zone. But as viewing habits evolve and people move toward more on-demand services like Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube, traditional scheduling has started to become irrelevant.
But on-demand services fail to capture a new type of market for media consumption that hybridizes the consumption of online, on-demand content with the traditional model of scheduling content for broadcast according to channels and time zones. For example, YouTube allows people to run “channels,” which allows channel owners to profit from their content via advertising agreements with YouTube. But YouTube does not allow its users to set a schedule where content can be consumed on a set schedule simply by tuning into that channel.
Moreover, because this hybrid model of placing on-demand content into structured schedules does not yet exist, the tools to facilitate this kind of scheduling similarly do not exist. Innovators in this field have failed to adequately develop tools for content scheduling that can facilitate the scheduling of streaming content that can be viewed in different times zones. In the same way, there has never before been a need for a tool that can facilitate scheduling of completely different streaming content schedules for different locations based on time zone.
It has yet to be appreciated that there is a need for new tools to facilitate content scheduling of videos that are available for on-demand streaming, and especially a need for tools that facilitate easy scheduling of content across multiple time zones.